With a new month just beginning I thought it would be rather fun to resurrect an idea that proved popular on another blog that I ran in 2010; the idea being to start a brand new spread betting account with an initial deposit of £1000 and to trade this real-life account over the coming months…

I’m sure you all know what a whipsaw loss is. You buy the FTSE 100 index (for example) at the 5000 price level with a protective stop order at 4900. You get stopped out, losing you £100, and…

In my previous article I painted a rather rosy picture of how spread bettors can hold on to trades potentially forever, capturing a stream of dividends along the way just like ‘investors’ do.

Spread bets pay dividends. I suggest that on longer-term position trades these dividend receipts might go some way to offsetting the daily financing charges that are levied by the spread betting companies on rolling spread bets.

Are you one of those spread bettors who sits in front of your trading screen(s) all day looking for opportunities to place a trade manually when the time is right? Or are you more laid back — okay, let’s admit it, employed in your day job?

Some news comes completely out of the blue. Other news you can predict, because companies issue trading updates at well-publicised times. But is it wise to open a spread betting position on what the results are going to be?

To continue the theme of price gaps the I began in my previous article, I should point out that such price gaps are really only a problem if you employ non-guaranteed stop orders to manage your risk.

A price gap occurs when the price of a financial instrument falls (or rises) far and fast, moving apparently from one price level to another with no opportunity to trade at prices in between; more importantly, with no opportunity to stop-out at a price in between.

I imagine your are getting a little weary of my money management talk, and so am I (for now), so I thought I’d end the week with a different topic: the topic of Trading Mistakes

The idea of formal trade analysis is to gather some statistics on your real-life (ideally) or back-tested trades so that you have some plausible probabilities to feed into the Kelly Formula.